Centre for Policy on Ageing



Age-related decline in prospective memory — the roles of cue accessibility and cue sensitivity
Author(s)	Robert West, Fergus I M Craik
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 14, no 2, June 1999
Pages	pp 264-272
Keywords	Mental ageing ; Mental speed ; Mental clarity ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; Evaluation ; Canada.
Annotation	In two experiments, the authors evaluated the hypothesis that age-related decline in prospective memory reflects momentary lapses of intention (MLIs) and explored two factors - cue sensitivity and accessibility - that may contribute to MLIs. MLIs were reliably greater than zero in Experiment 1, indicating that performance fluctuated over the course of the task. Analysis of the response latency data (RL) revealed that older adults demonstrated elevated RL for missed prospective cues and were much slower to respond correctly to prospective cues than younger adults. These findings indicate preserved cue sensitivity in later adulthood and an age-related decline in cue accessibility. Experiment 2 demonstrated that cue sensitivity did not result from an orienting response to the perceptual novelty associated with the prospective cues. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-990825217 A
Classmark	D6: DG: DF: BB: SD6: 4C: 7S
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.